May 16, 2011 4:46 PM
Last year, I moved into the Flash Builder engineering team as a developer. Working on a developer tool is fun and satisfying. Especially when the work you do helps developers code faster and easily build mobile apps. For example, take some of the coding productivity features baked in Flash Builder 4.5, there are some killer time-savers present in there1.

Looking back, some events clearly stand out: seeing Flex mobile come alive with our one-click debug workflow, experiencing first-hand the coding productivity features we built, presenting a sneak peek at Adobe MAX 2010 and most exciting of all, to see Flex 4.5 and Flash Builder ship.

Sneak Peek

Last October, I flew to Los Angeles to attend Adobe MAX. This was my first MAX and I was completely blown away by the scale and most importantly, by the passion people had for Adobe's products. The Flex community is vibrant, alive and filled with talented people.

It was amazing to be given the opportunity to demo my prototype at the MAX Sneak Peek3 to a crowd of over four-thousand people at Adobe MAX 2010, Los Angeles. A recording of the demo is up on Youtube:

This is the biggest audience I've ever presented to and it was nerve-wracking backstage especially after hearing the crowd roar for the preceding sneaks: Flash to HTML5 and Pixel bender 3D. I almost had a heart-attack when the application failed to launch at the end. Control + Z to undo my mistyping saved the demo.

The Future

Looks incredibly exciting. Expect useful posts4 about Flex and Flash Builder in the near term.

CategoryFlex Comment(s)


[1] Code templates2! With dynamic variable support! You can find the complete list of new features in Flash Builder 4.5 at this devnet page.
[2] This makes my hoard of MXML/AS yasnippet templates obsolete.
[3] For the un-initiated, a Sneak peek showcases technology with no guarantees that it will make it into a product. Think of it as ten engineers showing cool demos one after the other.
[4] Unlike this post which talks about something personal that happened a long time ago.

Copyright © 2004-2011 Anirudh Sasikumar. All rights reserved.
Last Updated: May 16, 2011 7:04 PM